AI’s Citation Crisis: Hallucinations Plague Prestigious NeurIPS Conference

The rise of artificial intelligence has brought with it a wave of innovation and, unfortunately, a troubling new phenomenon: AI-generated “hallucinations.” These aren’t the visual or auditory experiences one might associate with the term, but rather the creation of plausible-sounding, yet completely fabricated, information by AI systems. A recent investigation highlights a particularly concerning manifestation of this issue within the realm of academic research.

The focus of this investigation, conducted by the startup GPTZero, centers on the prestigious NeurIPS (Neural Information Processing Systems) conference. GPTZero‘s research reveals the presence of “hallucinated” citations within papers accepted and presented at NeurIPS. These citations, while appearing legitimate at first glance, point to sources that either don’t exist or don’t contain the information referenced. The implications are significant, raising serious questions about the integrity of the research process and the challenges faced by academic institutions in the age of sophisticated AI.

The Problem of AI